Exclusive: The Arrival of LL Cool J

In this exclusive excerpt from Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label, the forthcoming book about the legendary hip-hop label, key players—including Russell Simmons, Rick Rubin, the Beastie Boys's Ad-Rock, and LL himself—recall the rise of a rap superstar

Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock, Beastie Boys): People started sending demo tapes to Rick [Rubin]’s dorm room after he made T La Rock’s "It’s Yours." He didn’t really listen to them—at least not that I ever saw. So I listened to a lot of them and heard LL’s.

LL Cool J:I started hearing rap recordings when I was about nine years old. There were different tapes circulating from groups like the Cold Crush Brothers. When "Rapper’s Delight" and that whole wave began coming out in 1979, it drove me up the wall, it was awesome, it was the first time I heard guys like me sounding powerful—The Funky 4 + 1, the Treacherous Three, the Crash Crew, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.

I was about twelve when I started writing my own rhymes. One day in junior high, there was this lone kid, wearing a knapsack, walking about twenty or thirty feet in front of me. It was just the two of us in the hallway. He was kind of diddy boppin’ and singing his version of the children’s song "This Old Man"—"This DJ, he gets down, mixing records while they go round." I couldn’t see his face, but I could hear the echo in the hallway. It was as if he was in another dimension, in slow motion, like a dream. But the way he did it, I was, like, "I wanna do that right now!" After that, I was writing, writing, writing. At fourteen, I started sending out demo tapes.

When I heard "It’s Yours," I sent a tape to the address on the cover of the single: 5 University Place. And his phone number was on the label: 212-420-8666. So I called Rick every day for, like, two weeks. "Rick, you get the tape yet?" "Nope." "Yo, Rick, you get the tape yet?" "Nope." But Ad-Rock listened to my demo, and he let Rick hear it.

Adam Horovitz: You could tell that LL was in school. I was in high school, too, so I recognized all these weird science words that he was saying. You could see that he was probably doing homework, then writing rhymes, then doing homework. His rhymes were recorded over "It’s Yours." I thought it was great, so I played it for Rick.

Rick Rubin: This was the summer when Horovitz kinda lived in the dorm with me. We started getting demo tapes as if we were a record company, and one of the tapes was labeled Ladies Love Cool James. I think Horovitz might have heard it first, then called it to my attention. We listened to it and laughed...and that was always a good sign.

LL Cool J: Rick actually called me back at my house one day. I wasn’t there, but my grandmother answered. And she could tear a name in half like confetti: "Slick Stubin." "Jimmy Hoogan." "Flip Loogan." "Trick Lubin." I was like, "Rick Rubin?" She said, "Yeah, that’s it!" Jumped on the old rotary phone. Rick was like, "Yo, this is Rick. Come on down. Let’s make a demo." I said, "Word? Oh, man!" People take pills to feel like that!

Adam Horovitz: He was a kid. He had the classic early eighties b-boy look: tight Lee jeans, adidas shell toes, fat laces going up the leg, a Kangol, Cazals, a Le Tigre shirt. And LL was just like, "Who are these people? What’s up with these white boys?" Not only that, but Rick was in this weird dorm room. I’m assuming LL expected it to be an office with a secretary and coffee—like on TV. He was just shocked. It was really funny.

LL Cool J: When Rick came downstairs, the first thing I said was, "Yo, you Rick?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "I thought you was black." He said, "Cool."

Rick Rubin: Everyone I met in hip-hop was surprised that I was white. It really was an oddity in the places I was going. But I felt like our passion for music overrode any color, or of my being, you know, the suburban kid. It seemed like we had something in common that was much more profound and special than our differences, something that not so many people had: the love of this music. And together we were the minority. That’s how I felt.

Adam Horovitz: Then we went to the studio and recorded "I Need a Beat." I’d made all these beats on Rick’s drum machine, and he used one of them. I got credit on the 12-inch, but not on the album. Waddaya gonna do?

LL Cool J: As soon as we finished the demo, me and Rick played it for Russell. I remember sitting on a pillow because Russell didn’t have chairs in his office at 1133 Broadway. Russell looked at me then asked Rick, "Who’s this guy smilin’ at?" He was smiling, too. Until then, I’d never heard of him. All I knew was that he was behind that desk and had something to do with my dream. Russell was one of those guys who could speak prophecy into your life. He said, "This is LL—he’s gonna make a fortune." You know, it was written. He’d just take me everywhere and say that.

Rick Rubin: I brought it to Russell and said, "I just finished this record. What should I do with it?" He said, "It’s great. It’s a hit. Let’s give it to Profile." I said, "All you’ve done since we’ve been friends is complain to me about Profile—you hate ’em, you don’t trust ’em, you have to do all the work because they don’t do any, they steal from you, they don’t pay you. Why would we give it to them?" He said, "Well, there are so few options." I said, "Why don’t we just do it ourselves?" He said, "I don’t wanna do that because I’m gonna start a real label." He talked about Robert Ford because Robert Ford was his mentor, and he had an imprint deal with Mercury Records. That was the path Russell wanted to go. I said, "This won’t get in the way of that. This is separate. Let’s do a little independent company. I’ll make all the records. I’ll do all the work. I’ll do everything. You just be my partner."

The point is Russell was real. He was in an office with his phone ringing, doing business with people about rap music. I was a kid in a dorm room, listening to heavy metal records. It was a big gulf. With Russell as my partner, Def Jam was automatically a real thing. And I loved him! I loved hanging out with him! It felt like a natural outgrowth of our friendship: "Now we can do this thing together, and it’ll be real and it’ll be fun!" That was all of the expectation: to have it be fun.

Russell Simmons: I was getting a deal from Steve Ralbovsky at EMI. It was gonna be Rush Records. Then along comes Rick. I gave him some money: $2,100. The label put out LL’s first record, "I Need a Beat." It started selling before people even heard it because the core community that bought the cool records saw the Def Jam label—and "It’s Yours" was on Def Jam. Rick created the label in 1982. That was his.

Lyor Cohen: I remember going to Rick’s dorm room when he was hunched over in real pain and frustration, looking through these Pantone color chip booklets and trying to get exactly the right maroon for the covers of Def Jam’s 12-inch singles. Any other person would have said, "It looks beautiful. We’re done." But the way the logo looks—how it touches and feels—is not the result of a collision of wonderful accidents. It was because of Rick Rubin’s extremely focused hard work. He cared about the aesthetic so much!

In Stacy Gueraseva’s Def Jam Inc., Rick says that his design of the logo—with the initial letters of each word made much bigger than the others—was meant to "emphasize that it’s about the DJ." In the logo, the label’s name is reinforced by a blueprint-like drawing of a Technics turntable tonearm as seen from above—created, according to Gueraseva, by "a girlfriend of Hose’s lead singer, Mike Espindle," working under Rick’s direction.

Chuck D (Public Enemy): We knew Def Jam was different from the beginning. First of all, we were very impressed by the crisp design of the logo with the turntable tonearm worked into it. Hank and I knew that logos are important. [Hank Shocklee was Chuck’s partner in Public Enemy and the captain of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production unit.] They held the rock world together, from the Beatles’s Apple label to the Rolling Stones’s tongue to the brand for Iron Maiden.

Scarface (founding member of the Geto Boys, director of Def Jam South, 1999-2003): When Def Jam put out singles, we didn’t even care who the artist was. We just respected the brand—the turntable with the needle on it.

T La Rock: I first met LL Cool J when I did a show with Kurtis Blow and someone else at the Encore in Queens. Here comes this light-skinned guy with a hat on, running up to me. "T La Rock! T La Rock! I’m so glad to meet you. You gotta hear me. I sound just like you." To be honest with you, I liked "I Need a Beat." But at the same time I was thinking, "Wow, Rick did it. He found him another T La Rock."

Bill Stephney (producer): I thought "I Need a Beat" was a Run solo record at first. LL sounded like Run, and musically it was just so much in keeping with the minimalism of "Sucker M.C.’s"—beat and voice, beat and voice. But such energy! It was bursting!

Alonzo "Mr. Hyde" Brown: Every time he came into the room, he was just this ball of energy, like, something had to happen for him. I remember Andre [Harrell] and I were riding in a car across the Queensboro Bridge to Silver Lake Studios to shoot Krush Groove. LL’s in the back. He was like, "Can I come with y’all?"

"All right. Fine."

He was like, "Yo, yo, yo! So y’all get girls and everything? How much money y’all make?"

He had so many questions. He was so youthful.

Chris Lighty (vice president of A&R, Def Jam, 1994-2000): I bought a copy of "I Need a Beat" when I was in the seventh or eighth grade, growing up in the Bronx River Projects, seeing Afrika Bambaataa and all of them. To me, these were grown men. When I found out LL was sixteen, I was, like, "Wow, somebody let a kid make a record? This guy is bigger and better than T La Rock, better than all these old old-school guys. This is the most incredible thing possible. I need to be down with that crew."

Ludacris: LL was one of the people who influenced me the most. When I was in the fourth grade, I knew every word to "I’m Bad." Every time I heard LL, I was like, "Man, this is what I want to do!"

Kevin Liles (president of Def Jam, 1999-2003): I had the Kangol. I had the Troop sweat suit. You could not tell me that no rapper could rap quite like I could. I was LL. All these things that I have lived my whole life by, he put into records. He made you feel like, "Yeah, we’re playing football, but it’s the Super Bowl every day for me." The only people I would never put up against Todd were Run-DMC—because I was Run, too! [LL’s given name is James Todd Smith. His friends and associates call him Todd.]

Russell Simmons: Andre [Harrell] came into my office one day and told me that he didn’t want to be a rapper no more ’cause LL Cool J ate him up so bad. He used to work out of the Rush office, anonymously booking Jekyll & Hyde as the opening act for other Rush acts. Andre put himself on a show with LL, came back, and said [laughs], "That muthafucka whipped my ass. I don’t wanna be a rapper no more."

Chuck D: Hank Shocklee and Harry Allen went to Manhattan Center to see T La Rock, and when they came back to our studio in Hempstead, all they kept talking about was LL—the kid who opened the show. I’m like, "What the hell is an LL?" When we heard, "I Need a Beat," it was like, "Oh, wow, this is the dude LL—and he’s coming up with the same rhyme style that T La Rock initiated with pretty much the same big beats."

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014). GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.